[highCs]

Id Software, have made hundreds of millions of dollars (if not $1B)

They didn't make that much, far from that. Id Software has been sold to zenimax with all its assets including their IPs and their people for only (edit: and around) 1 hundred million dollar - because they were runnning out of cash.

My advice to the codecombat devs is at the opposite of pg's one: don't talk to the game industry. Most of all those said big players of the game industry aren't at all. They are actually bad software companies with poor revenues. Ubisoft for example never made more than a dozen percents a year or similar - I mean they never made 300%. You could be worth more than Id Software and even Ubisoft "easily" following the valley advices instead of the game industry ones. Really it's a myth the game industry is making well. At least, nothing comparable to the web startups. Only a very very few of them actually does like Valve, Riot and Blizzard.

Edit - a source about Id Software acquisition: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1092835/0001092835090...

[jiggy2011]

Gaming IP must lose value over time. It's hard to imagine anybody paying very much for the quake 3 IP now since more advanced engines are available for free.

That's not to say they didn't make many $ licensing it back in the early 2000s. That said in the case of this startup the tech itself is probably not where most of the value is.

[gsaines]

That's useful feedback highCs, but open sourcing doesn't necessarily select our industry or business prospects. It seems to me we could be open source and high growth, or closed source and slow growth and the two factors are not necessarily causative. Would love to know if you have data to the contrary!